I’ve wanted to make Roasted Potato Sourdough since the first time I saw the recipe. I knew that I was going to start it too late to eat it on Sunday, but I decided that I didn’t want to keep looking around for a different sourdough recipe to settle on.

This bread is a sourdough bread that has chunks of potatoes roasted with garlic and olive oil in it. Doesn’t that sound awesome? Of course, that means the first step is to roast the potatoes. I used Russet potatoes, rather than the ones that she originally used. They had to cool completely before I put them into the dough, which I took care of by cooling partway and then sticking them in the fridge to cool them off faster.

I didn’t think about the fact that I would be making 3 or 4 loaves of bread with this recipe until after I’d already started mixing the dough together. I mixed sourdough starter and white and whole wheat flours with some water, about 350 milliliters. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by a “medium dough consistency,” but in any case I decided that my dough needed more water. I added another 100 or so milliliters, but adding water after a dough forms is a very messy process. It doesn’t mix in particularly well; the dough just sloshes around as the stand mixer tries to mix it. I think I probably used about 1 3/4 cups water total.

I let the dough rest for 30 minutes, and I liked the consistency it was. I added the salt, but it didn’t really seem to want to mix in immediately (since I’d basically already kneaded the dough). I had to turn the dough a little by hand in the stand mixer to get it in a better position to mix in. Also, I didn’t have to mix it much at all to get it to windowpane properly since I’d mixed it so much before letting it rest. The potatoes also didn’t want to mix in immediately. I’m sure that the stand mixer was mashing some of the potatoes as it ran, but I think that folding the potatoes into the dough by hand may have been an easier way to incorporate them. I had to stop the stand mixer a few times to turn my dough and to try to get the potatoes on the bottom of the bowl to be folded into the dough.

I heated the oven for 1 minute and put the dough in there to rise, folding it 2 times in 2.5 hours.

The original recipe shapes these loaves a little differently. I didn’t have the equipment to shape them as she does [see the original recipe to see how neat her loaves look] or the time to figure out if I could do it similarly. I just shaped the dough into 3 loaves, put them on baking sheets that I would bake them on (since I don’t have a baking stone or peel), and put them in a briefly heated oven to rise again.

I removed them about 20 minutes before their resting time was over so that I could put a pan of water in the oven and preheat it. I baked them for 10 minutes, removed the pan of water, and baked them another 20 minutes. I left them in the oven for 10 more minutes with the door ajar.

Roasted Potato Sourdough

This bread was really good. I took a loaf to work on Monday and it received a lot of compliments. I didn’t have to bring any home, which of course is the best compliment I could have. The roasted potatoes were delicious in it and gave the bread a hint of garlic flavor. It was a lot of fun to have the potatoes to bite into.

Alex didn’t get to try any until Tuesday. He said that the bites without potatoes were fine, but were just bread. He enjoyed the bites that had potatoes much more. I did too, except that after a while (we ate this bread throughout the week) I got tired of eating cold potatoes. Yes, it helped if I heated up the bread, but the potatoes got a little dry. This might have been avoided if I’d gotten the potatoes a little more golden when I’d baked them (or if I’d used a different variety of potato). The bread was still soft on the inside throughout the week, and it had a great texture.

The crust tasted good on this bread, and it baked up rather nicely. They’re some of the prettier loaves of bread I’ve made.

I enjoyed this, particularly for the novelty factor of taking this bread to work and telling people that it was sourdough with roasted potatoes in it. I’d definitely make this again, but I’ll scale back the recipe so that I only make one loaf next time.